'Go forth and conquer, be safe," says San Diego Police Sgt. Andrew T. Hoffman in a ritual send-off to the 11 cops assembled at lineup for the SDPD's Central Division. These are the "C Squad" officers who cover the peak crime hours of 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. for the downtown and adjacent areas plus the Gaslamp Quarter's Bike Enforcement Team. Hoffman, 40, a street savvy 18-year veteran of the department, won't have long to wait to put his own admonition into practice.

An hour later and as thousands of San Diegans stream into Petco Park for a Friday night Padres game, a potentially life-and-death police drama plays out a scant few blocks away. A citizen's Crime Stoppers tip had alerted police that a wanted fugitive on parole from prison but with two felony warrants for his arrest was in a walk-up apartment behind a neighborhood grocery store in downtown's East Village area.

The SDPD radio dispatcher warns that the suspect is considered armed and dangerous. This could be much more than a routine arrest.

Hoffman abruptly breaks away from the start of his patrol rounds to supervise an operation that has to be coordinated carefully. Within minutes, six police officers, including a canine unit, gather in the back of the grocery store to plan the apprehension. Hoffman quickly gives instructions in a hushed voice. Guns drawn, the officers in single file quietly climb a narrow stairway leading to the door of a second-floor apartment. One officer carries a 9mm carbine at the ready, a necessary firepower augment should a shootout occur. Hoffman followed with a ride-along journalist in tow.

"Open the door, San Diego police," shouts the lead officer.

Silence from inside the apartment.

"Open the door NOW, San Diego police," he yells louder.

The police dog strains at his leash. Three officers have the doorway covered. The door opens. The officers enter quickly, ask for the fugitive and search the small apartment.

Moments later, a handcuffed man in his twenties is led out and down the stairs. Two females are also cuffed and questioned.

But the fugitive, if he had been there, is gone. The three persons in the apartment are questioned and released. The tense drama fizzles. The fugitive remains at large, still sought by the police.

Yet, for all this incident's anti-climatic ending, no one had to remind Hoffman and his apprehension team of just how hazardous seemingly routine police work can be.

Hoffman, like most cops, is matter-of-fact about the danger. But also, like veteran cops in particular, this Central Division officer is wary and watchful on every call.

Hoffman, like so many San Diego cops, has seen death and deadly peril at point-blank range. A young woman threatening suicide some years ago shot herself in the head right in front of him. "One instant she was there looking at me and the next she was a billion miles away," Hoffman remembers. It's an image he'll never forget. More recently, Hoffman shot and wounded an armed assailant who fired at him first but missed, barely.

"An instructor at the police academy told me, 'this job is going to change you in ways you'll never know.'

"It can change you in ways that are inimical to law enforcement; like a leather wallet that's been through the wash one too many times," Hoffman says ruefully.

SOUTHEASTERN DIVISION

The San Diego Police Department's Southeastern Division includes some of the city's peak crime areas. Encanto, Paradise Hills, Lincoln Park, Chollas View, Shelltown and Southcrest are all neighborhoods where crime is more than a nuisance. It's a clear and present danger to the great majority of good citizens there, many of whom are working class or lower-income Hispanics and African-Americans. In all of these neighborhoods, people struggle to earn a living, raise their kids in safety and enjoy whatever piece of the American dream they can manage. Arrayed against them are street gangs, drug dealing, burglary, robbery, assaults and occasional homicides.

In many of these neighborhoods, the decorative item of choice is iron bars over the ground-floor windows and doors. It's the telltale sign of crime-ridden neighborhoods where residents feel compelled to armor their homes against intruders. Touchingly, some of these same modest bungalows and tract houses also fly an American flag – a tribute to hope and pride, however beleaguered.

What stands between these good citizens and the menace of crime on any given day are the police officers of Southeastern Division.

Twenty cops were present for duty one Friday afternoon for the division's typically crime-heavy second watch from 2 p.m. to midnight.

Reggie Frank, the senior SDPD sergeant at this lineup, briefs his officers on the incident log from the most recent Southeastern Division watches. A car chase, armed robbery, extortion threats, a stabbing and information on a fatal shooting in the department's neighboring Mid-City Division.

On this night, Sgt. Jim C. Schorr is accompanied by a journalist ride-along. Schorr is supervising what the division designates as the "440" beats in the Southeastern Division's western sector. In December, Schorr will mark 18 years of service with SDPD. This is his third tour in the Southeastern Division. He's a seasoned veteran who knows the turf.

His personal briefing begins by noting the good news in Southeastern – new commercial and housing developments, a good civic infrastructure and diminished crime in some neighborhoods.

Weighed against these indices of progress, however, are Southeastern's intractable problems.

Sgt. Romeo De Los Reyes, a supervisor in the SDPD's Gang Suppression Team, says these and other San Diego street gangs are by definition "purely criminal enterprises." With an estimated total membership of 5,000 or more, street gangs represent potentially San Diego's most serious crime problem.

"We do everything we can to be proactive," says De Los Reyes. "We put out a whole bunch of little fires to avoid the big fire."

Sgt. Schorr points out a neighborhood liquor store, Dr. J's in Lincoln Park, where suspected gang members committed a particular heinous crime just after midnight on Jan. 1, 2003. Armed assailants apparently looking for rival gang members drove up in two cars and opened fire into a crowd in front of the liquor store. Two women who had just left a New Year's church service were killed and a seven-year-old nephew of one of the women was wounded. The case remains unsolved and police have yet to make an arrest.

As Southeastern Division police struggle to keep a cap on the lawlessness and violence, their meager numbers compound the odds, Schorr says.

"I have seven officers and four cars tonight for half of the Southeastern Division.

"For the beat cop, you're going to reduce crime by being proactive and by putting people in jail. We really got into that POP (problem oriented policing) stuff. I headed up a (building) code compliance program. We got a crack house in one neighborhood torn down. The program went city wide," Schorr notes with evident pride.

But being proactive requires police numbers that Schorr noted SDPD doesn't have at present:

"Beat officers are just radio-driven now. They're going from call to call. There aren't enough police out here. Starting in the late 1980s, two-person beats for second and third watch (2 p.m. to midnight and midnight to 7 a.m.) were mandatory. Not now. We don't have enough officers.

"C Squad (the overlapping shift that covers during the peak crime hours of 5 p.m. to 3 a.m.) normally has six officers on the street in Southeastern. Tonight, we have two. In '88, my squad had 10 or 12 officers. Today I have five or six," Schorr says.

To spread this shrinking force, the number of Southeastern Division's police beats was reduced several years ago by the simple expedient of making each one bigger.

Schorr doesn't have to add that fewer police covering larger beats translates to less law enforcement for neighborhoods that need it most.

For a Friday night in Southeast, nonetheless, this one proves uncharacteristically quiet. About 10 p.m., Schorr's officers gather at a neighborhood trailer donated for their use by a friendly mobile home park owner. There, sitting at bare wooden tables and typing on their SDPD-issue laptop computers, Schorr's squad finishes its reports and submits them for his approval.

As they work, the normal police banter evolves into a remarkable dialogue. One by one, these Southeastern Division cops offer their personal views on the often mean streets they patrol and the people, good and bad, with whom they interact.

The most outspoken is patrol officer Kenneth Rawls, an African-American who grew up in Little Rock, Ark.

"There's a silent majority down here in terms of relations with the police, but political correctness is getting in the way of seeing what's really going on," Rawls complains.

"A lot of the problems here are self-made. Teen pregnancy, drug use and addiction; the hell that a lot of people make for themselves through a lack of responsibility," he adds.

"I went to the Encanto street fair. A lady came up to me and said 'I'm really glad to see you out here. It makes me feel safe.' Other citizens are negative. They've been through the system, they've had negative contacts with the police. It's frustrating to come out here and put my life on the line for people who really don't care," Rawls complains.

"It's the breakdown of families, morals and standards," says another officer. Patrol officer Tina Williams complains about an incident in which she was interviewing a beating victim at a trolley stop while rocks were thrown at her car.

Where, then, is the job satisfaction in all this?

Rawls speaks first.

"I want to go where I think I can do the most good. That's what I take home. I'm not going to compromise my values. I worked in La Jolla for three months and I'd rather work here where my skills are tested, where I have the chance to do the most good."

Adds another officer: "This is what we signed up for, this is why we became cops."

Suddenly, a radio call beckoned to a grimmer reality: a shooting in front of an apartment complex. In seconds, the trailer empties as officers hurry to respond.

On the way, the radio dispatcher adds details.

At the apartment complex, the mostly Hispanic residents cannot or will not say who, if anyone, had been shot. No victim was found. The only shell casing found on the ground had been there for months.

"It says something when the only physical evidence of a shooting here comes from a previous shooting. Maybe somebody with a gunshot wound will turn up at a hospital. Until then, we just don't know, says Schorr with a rhetorical shrug.

MID-CITY DIVISION

The Mid-City Division is the San Diego Police Department's largest command. On a typical Friday night, 25 to 30 officers will patrol its 12 beats. Most often, there are 10 two-officer cars and eight one-officer cars. Gang Suppression Team units are frequently present, as well.

The divison encompasses everything between Interstate 805 on the west to 70th Street and La Mesa on the east and from the 94/M.L. King freeway on the south to Interstate 8 on the north.

In no other division does the SDPD make so great an effort at community outreach. The department staffs four neighborhood storefront offices devoted mainly to community relations. The department recruits community service officers, in effect uniformed auxiliary police who speak the multitude of languages found in Mid-City. The Vietnamese Community Center offices on University Avenue house an SDPD storefront with 12 community service officers.

The Mid-City Division boasts what police say is the only Somali sworn police officer in the United States, patrol officer Ardweli Heibeh, and one of the department's two Cambodian officers, patrol officer Sopheap Cheam.

Roll call at the Mid-City Division station one Friday afternoon counts 29 police for the 2 p.m. to midnight second watch. Patrol officer Richard Fox draws the journalist ride-along assignment.

Fox is a 10-year SDPD veteran who also spent a year in Oakland with the Drug Enforcement Administration. He holds a finance degree from San Diego State University and is working on a master's degree in criminal justice from Boston University.

Fox's contribution to the SDPD's problem-oriented policing strategy is an innovative outreach program aimed at working with students and residents to curb disruptive partying by San Diego State students in residential areas. Fox counts himself a strong advocate of such community-oriented policing but complains that San Diego cops today have too little time to do it right.

Cops sometimes describe themselves, and their work, as a mix of "overpaid baby sitters, underpaid family counselors and psychologists and well-paid trash collectors."

Fox's second watch shift fits some of that.

Prostitution problems, street crime, a terminal cancer patient and enforcing the "broken-window" doctrine of law enforcement fill the evening.

The "broken-window" theory holds that ignoring minor violations of the law breeds contempt for all laws.

So, Fox tickets a motorist for tossing a lit cigarette on the street and writes a $340 citation for a woman who deliberately parks illegally in a convenience store's handicap space.

An undercover vice operation that evening makes several prostitution arrests. A gang-fight call on University Avenue turns up no victim and no assailants. The night's capper is a call that a wanted parole violator with a history of violence was in a local restaurant. Fox and two other police wait a discreet distance away while two plainclothes detectives enter the restaurant to check if the parolee was there. He wasn't.

SOUTHERN

DIVISION

On a sunny Thursday afternoon in the SDPD's Southern Division, the second watch lineup finds only eight officers present to cover the nine police beats between the U.S.-Mexico border and Chula Vista.

Supervising Sgt. Wesley Albers, a Minnesota native and law enforcement graduate of Mankato State College, is an aspiring writer who runs an annual Southern California writer's conference. "We're breaking stereotypes," he says of today's cops. "We're no longer the old knuckle-draggers. You'll find plenty of cops with bachelor's and master's degrees. One guy in Northern (Division) has a Ph.D."

Southern Division stretches east and west along the U.S.-Mexico border and north to Chula Vista.

A formerly lawless border Albers described as "the last of the old West" was tamed by the U.S. government's Operation Gatekeeper beginning in the 1990s. "The difference is huge, huge," Albers says of the physical barriers and broad access roads that now run the length of the border in the San Diego-Tijuana sector.

Gatekeeper dramatically curtailed the robberies, assaults and murders of Mexican migrants by border bandits. What had been a near-combat zone that often spilled over into U.S. territory is now a mostly orderly, well-defined and aggressively policed border.

Here, auto thefts are the biggest law enforcement problem. Southern Division detectives report that 60 percent of the stolen cars they track wind up in Mexico. How cooperative are Mexican authorities in locating and returning the cars? An SDPD detective ducks an answer with a telling shrug.

Later, Sgt. Albers waxes philosophically about the special burdens of being a cop, a career choice notoriously tough on marriages and long on stress.

"People want you around but they don't want you playing with their children."

COMMUNITY POLICING

Ameeting one evening at St. Jude's Catholic Church in the Southeastern San Diego neighborhood of Southcrest offers a textbook example of community oriented policing.

SDPD Capt. David Ramirez, recently become Southeastern Division commander, and Lt. Kimberely McElroy are there to listen, take notes and offer assistance. Community organizers Kevin Malone and Yolanda Burruel and St. Jude's parish priest, Father Henry Rodriguez, are there to provide citizen-police liaison, as they have for years. Defending Southcrest is a permanent task.

About 20 residents from the neighborhood are there asking for help.

One by one, and mostly in Spanish, they relate the threats to their families and their neighborhood.

"I have problems with drug dealers, drug sales, every day. Two or three months ago, we had a drive-by shooting," says one woman.

"There's more violence than before," complains Malone.

"A lot of people are scared," adds a woman, who wants to help the police by providing information but worries about retribution.

A man sitting in the back row rises to give the address of a house where he says drugs are being sold.